a divorce. They sent him away over the summer to stay with a family he didn’t know in Paradise Beach, in northern Florida. Every morning, Wilson would have breakfast with the family, then wander alone in search of treasures on the beach until lunch. Then after lunch he’d head back to the water to wander until dinner.
The creatures he found cast a spell on him. He saw crabs and needlefish in the water, toadfish and porpoises. One day he saw his first jellyfish. “The creature is astonishing. It existed outside my previous imagination,” he would write decades later. Another day he was sitting on a dock with his feet dangling in the water, when a gigantic ray, much bigger than anything else he’d seen, glided silently under his feet. “I was thunderstruck. And immediately seized with a need to see this behemoth again, to capture it if I could and to examine it close up.”
To a child everything looks bigger. “I estimate that when I was seven years old I saw animals at about twice the size I see them now,” Wilson later wrote. He was transfixed by these silent creatures but glimpsed something more—a hidden new world under the surface of the waters to venture into and explore. His family life was falling apart a few hundred miles away, but here he felt a curiosity and a sense of belonging, one that would last all his life. That summer, a naturalist was born.
“A child comes to the edge of deep water with a mind prepared for wonder,” Wilson observed decades later in Naturalist, his memoir. “Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist….Better to spend long stretches of time just searching and dreaming.”
This was what you might call Wilson’s annunciation moment. That’s the moment when something sparks an interest, or casts a spell, and arouses a desire that somehow prefigures much of what comes after in a life, both the delights and the challenges. Most days pass in an unmemorable flow, but, every once in a while, a new passion is silently conceived. Something delights you and you are forever after entranced by that fascinating thing. Wilson found nature at age seven and has spent the ensuing seven decades studying it, becoming one of the most prominent scientists in the world.
When you hear adults talk about their annunciation moments, they often tell stories of something lost and something found. Wilson was losing his parental home, and found in nature a home where he would always be welcome. I know a man whose father drank too much, and the family was always desperately short of money. This man fell in love with shopkeeping and business and eventually made himself into a multibillionaire. The writer Andrew Solomon heard about the Holocaust when he was a boy and thought about how awful it was that the European Jews had nowhere to go when trouble came. “I decided that I would always have someplace to go,” he declared in one book talk, and so was born a life of travel and travel writing. As my friend April Lawson puts it, we were all missing something as children, and as adults we’re willing to put up with a lot in order to get it.
The other interesting thing about annunciation moments is how aesthetic they are. Often, they happen when a child finds something that just seems sublime. They are going about their life in its normal course, and then suddenly beauty strikes. Some sight or experience renders them dumb with wonder—a stingray gliding beneath one’s feet.
To feel wonder in the face of beauty is to be grandly astonished. A person entranced by wonder is pulled out of the normal voice-in-your-head self-absorption and finds herself awed by something greater than herself. There’s a feeling of radical openness, curiosity, and reverence. There’s an instant freshness of perception, a desire to approach and affiliate.
The ocean for Wilson was an entire captivating world to explore. “A beautiful thing, though simple in its immediate presence,” Frederick Turner observes, “always gives us a sense of depth below depth, almost an innocent wild vertigo as one falls through its levels.”
I have a son who as a five-year-old glimpsed the beauty of a baseball field and of the players on it; before long he was obsessed and entranced by baseball. Baseball became the way he processed the world. It was the way he organized geography, learned math. Baseball became the